Why creation evangelism?

That’s the question I was asked by an online friend/acquaintance yesterday. It was a sincere attempt from another Christian believer to understand why I feel called to focus on creation evangelism. Why not just evangelism?

I’ve included my response just after the break. Of course, I’ve edited out a few personal comments and the dreaded typo (one of which drastically changed the meaning of what I had intended to say!), and done some editorial cleaning up here and there. There are few passions as near and dear to my heart as this one.

“Why creation evangelism? Why not just evangelism? Why the emphasis on creation?”

Excellent, excellent question. There is an elder in my church (a wise, humble, Godly man with an amazing servant’s heart) who has asked me variations of this question more than once. People who have been believers since they were young and/or come from many generations of believers, or at least were churched from the time they were young, often don’t understand the need for an emphasis on creation. It’s not their fault.

The emphasis comes from looking at the difference between the way Peter evangelized the nation of Israel (e.g. in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost) contrasted with the way Paul evangelized the Greeks on Mars Hill in Athens (in Acts 17).

Peter was speaking to a people (the Jewish diaspora, gathered in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, just a handful of weeks after the crucifixion of Jesus), a people who understood who the One True God was, they understood the authority of their Scriptures, they knew what sin was, they knew they needed a messiah…they just missed the Messiah when He came. In essence, they already understood the bad news. So Peter’s message to them, paraphrased, is “Repent from your sin…you who killed your own Messiah!” And thousands were saved and added to the church that day. They recognized the bad news, then heard the good news. They believed and were saved.

Paul, in his various missionary journeys, would often reason the very same way in the synagogues where he travelled. But when he arrived in Athens, and spoke on Mars Hill with the Stoics and Epicureans, he knew he was speaking among a people who had no idea who the True God was, they had no clue what sin was, and hence no understanding of a need for a savior, certainly not one who would have to die. This is why the gospel is “foolishness” to the Greeks while a “stumbling block” to the Jews (1 Cor 1:23). The Jews misunderstood what their own Scriptures had said about the Messiah, but the Greeks were completely lost from the get-go.

So what did Paul do? He took them all the way back to creation and explained to them who the True God was (used their own culture – sculptures and poetry – to do so), explained what sin was, and why there was a need for a savior. He gave them the bad news, from the beginning, so he could then preach the gospel to them.

What was the result? A few believed, right away. More people wanted to hear him out another time. And, of course, as always happens when the gospel is presented in a mass setting, a few scoffed. All in all, a pretty good response.

Unfortunately, many Bible colleges, seminaries, and missionary organizations over the last several decades have literally taught their students, “Look at how foolish Paul was. He got all intellectual with his listeners, and only a few believed. In contrast, Peter boldly declared, ‘Repent, you sinners,’ and thousands believed. So don’t evangelize like Paul, evangelize like Peter.”

Unfortunately, our western culture, especially since the 1950s or so, has become radically more like the culture of the Greeks on Mars Hill than the Jews in Jerusalem on Pentecost. A vast number of people today have no concept of who the One True God really is. They’ve been bombarded by postmodernism and by eastern religious thought. They have no proper understanding of sin. The Bible is not an authority to them. So to simply come and preach the gospel without laying the proper groundwork leads almost always to immediately ignoring or scoffing, or at best (maybe at worst) crisis-based conversions that don’t last because they had no root (as in Mark 4:5-6, 16-17).

The stakes are raised when you consider the stranglehold that evolutionary teaching has on our culture. Every western governmental school curriculum and museum is founded on evolution. It’s being taught (as established fact) earlier and earlier. Its concepts are found in nearly every popular movie and TV show. What do evangelists for atheism like Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and all the rest push as the reason for completely waving away Christianity? The belief (in their minds, the fact) that evolution is undeniably true. If people grow up from the very earliest ages simply accepting evolution as fact, then they simply toss away the gospel as just one of many quaint, ancient, unnecessary, irrelevant myths.

In fact, most atheists understand the critical importance of the Genesis creation account as the foundation for the whole Christian faith better than many professing Christians do! If Adam and Eve were not actual people created in an actual garden, and didn’t reject an actual command of God by eating forbidden fruit (that is, if they didn’t actually sin), egged on by an actual serpent, then people would not need saving from anything, and hence there would be no need for a savior. The entire Christian faith hangs on the Genesis creation account being true. If it’s not true, everything else is totally unnecessary.

And not only every foundational Christian doctrine, look at some of the less obvious things. Why wear clothes (if you don’t live in ND winters)? Because of what happened in the garden. Why do we need to work to survive? Same reason. Why is marriage between one man and one woman, and nothing else? Because of how God created. You can keep going with these sorts of questions. They all hang on Genesis being true.

Even this one – nearly every culture in the world operates on a 7-day week. Why? Is there any facet of astronomy that would lead us towards a 7-day week?

a. The year is based on the revolution of the earth about the sun.
b. The month is based on the revolution of the moon about the earth.
c. The day is based on the rotation of the earth about its own axis.
d. What about the week?

There is nothing…except this: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:11). The nearly ubiquitous nature of the 7-day week across cultures lends enormous weight to a human race that has descended from one family (Noah’s) after a global flood, and dispersed about the earth from the Tower of Babel. Also, this statement from Exodus (later written down on tablets of stone by the very finger of God Himself – Exodus 31:18), becomes meaningless if those seven days were not days as we have always understood them, rather than some literary framework or monstrously large periods of time.

It’s even harder to help believers who already know evolution isn’t true to understand why the millions/billions-of-years scenario is so harmful. But if death and bloodshed came through sin and sin came through one man, the first man, Adam (Romans 5:12), then how could there have been millions of years of death and bloodshed before there even was man or sin?

Finally, for myself, once I understood all this, I found that it became much, much easier to engage just about any person in a conversation that could lead neatly to a ripe moment for evangelism. It became natural for me to evangelize, because even though people don’t really care what I think about religion, most people love to talk about what they believe, and it’s actually quite easy to get them talking about what they believe until they have to face a crisis point where their belief system doesn’t square up with the reality they know they see. Some people simply go on living with this cognitive dissonance (isn’t that what postmodernism and eastern thought is all about? As in, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”). But others accept the gospel message and are saved, all because the evolutionary deception has been exposed for them.

I freely admit not every Christian is called to evangelize this way. But I am. And in this culture, creation evangelism has taken on an incredibly important role, since we’re speaking to an audience more like the one Paul spoke to on Mars Hill rather than like the audience Peter spoke to in Jerusalem on Pentecost. It has, however, taken me years to allow God to equip me with the necessary maturity and humility to evangelize this way, because the danger is always to become conceited, or to forget that the gospel is the true aim (see my previous post, Keeping the gospel central). Leading someone to believe that there is a creator but never pointing them to Christ is just as tragic as them never accepting there’s a creator.

Responses

Interesting post. However how do you account for the fact that most people who support evolution also believe in God? And that there are literally thousands of of scientists who do research in evolution who are also evangelical Christians – people such as Mary Schweitzer, Francis Collins, and Stephen Godfrey to name just a few.

How do you account for the fact that many of the major Christian denominations have statements of support for the teaching of evolution over creationism and ID? These include the Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, Lutheran Church and others.

And then finally there are tens of thousands of clergy – Jewish, Baptist, Church of Christ, etc – who have signed the Clergy Letter – a letter of support for the teaching of evolution and stating that there is no necessary conflict between the teachings of Christianity and evolution .

Although I am not a Christian and am in fact an atheist I do not think that the whole of Christian faith depends on a literal reading of Genesis. If it did then Chrisitianity is a doomed faith because evolution has the evidence and it has and is happening.

Thanks for reading and taking the time to respond. You’ve asked some good questions. Without writing another entire essay, I hope to at least point you in the right direction.

There are some different questions here (and one assumption):

1. How can some people believe in God and also evolution, including many scientists?
2. How can many Christian churches and denominations support the teaching of evolution and see no conflict with their faith?
3. Evolution “has the evidence and it has [happened] and is happening.”

Re: Q.1, many people believe in a god that is not the God laid out in the Bible.
Re: Q.2 (and sort of also Q.1), many people believe that Jesus died for their sins, but they are not well-grounded in their doctrines. So they also believe other things like evolution that, when it comes down to the fundamentals, are inconsistent with what the Bible teaches, especially the whole death-before-sin issue. Such people may still have true saving faith, but they’re living in two different, inconsistent worlds. There may be many reasons for this.
Additionally, many churches have wholly abandoned the Bible as their sole authority. So they may see nature as an authority on par with Scripture, not realizing that our fallen human minds have to interpret what we see in nature. God, as revealed in the Bible, has not set up nature as something able to reveal enough about God to induce saving faith in someone, only enough to condemn them if they don’t believe (see Romans Chapter 1).
Other churches may exalt current humans (like the Catholic magisterium) and past humans (church fathers) as infallible authorities on equal par with the Scripture. This invariably leads to inconsistencies.
Still other churches may simply not even understand, but they have a fear of man, and they don’t want to look “kooky” to the world, regardless of whether the Scripture is taught rightly. There are all sorts of potential reasons.

If one wants to believe in a Jesus who tried to teach us all how to be nice to each other and died because he was sadly misunderstood, a person can believe that, but that’s not the Jesus spoken of in the Bible. As C.S. Lewis so famously (and aptly) put it, Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. There is no other option.

Finally, what most people have been shown as evolution is merely natural selection. Informed creationists believe in natural selection because it has, in fact, been observed. It was, in fact, a creationist named Edward Blyth who was instrumental in putting together a working theory of natural selection before Darwin ever did. But natural selection only culls and isolates already existing features in a population, and so is unable to change dinosaurs into birds and apes into men. If you add in mutations, you certainly get changes, but changes that run in the wrong direction (downhill, so to speak, losing information, rather than gaining information). No known mutation has ever been shown to increase information in the genome, the type of information that would have to have been created from mutations constantly for evolution to have gone the way it has been supposed (by much hand-waving and storytelling).

For more in-depth coverage of all these issues, please peruse the FAQ page at Creation Ministries International (http://creation.com/qa).

I would disagree with you on what you say about Christians and evolution and the two being mutually contradictory. Most of the writings of those who hold this view do not view God as always being nice and as Jesus teaching us to be nice guys, which was one of your criticisms.

I believe though that they view the Bible as imparting information about man’s relationship with God. They do not view it as always correct about how the world work and how God created. How could it when those who wrote down their understanding of what God was saying did not have the background to understand.

In short, those who believe both in Christianity and in Evolution believe that the Bible shows how God has worked in man’s souls and science shows how God works in the physical universe.

I think their case is much stronger than what you have supposed it to be, although I am glad to see that you do believe that they are saved and are not going to hell for all eternity for believing in evolution. Many who believe similarly to you do not acknowledge them as Christian at all and do believe that they will spend eternity in hell.

I would also point out two more items. First the Bible was written by men, fallible men. Men who by virtue of being human could never understand the mind of God. Which means that what they put down in the Bible could be …. incomplete and not totally accurate.

Second it sounds nice and easy to say that Christianity needs to be based on the Bible and a literal reading at that. As if that would get rid of all difficulties and disagreements. However it does not because each man and woman is interpreting the Bible.

Now on to science – yes man is fallible but the process and methodology of science recognizes that. It is because it does and because its process works around that fallibility that science is such a powerful method for discovering how the world works. Pointing out that man is fallible is not an argument against evolution. Man also gets it right at times.

Kudos though for not leaving it there and pointing out what you perceive as flaws in evolutionary thought. I won’t argue the evolution bits with you this time other than to say that your information on evolution is wrong (Have you ever read, directly, what the evolutionary scientists have to say about those issues?) I have alreay used a response to post a rather long post – and on how Christianity and evolution are compatible at that! And me a good atheist.

Anyway here are a few links that you might check out on evolution.

The first is a Christian who is also a scientist discussing radiometric dating:

Finally (at last) I apologize for the length of my remarks. I can only say that my family and friends have mentioned to me, on occasion, that I can be long winded. And I can only state that there are volumes of information and arguments inherent in the discussion started here.

I do confess to be curious about your desire to defend the marriage of Christianity with evolution when you don’t believe in Christianity, the Bible, or God anyway.

Will try to make my reply short and sweet, but still cover some main points.

The websites you shared I am familiar with. Thanks for sharing them though.

What you say about the Bible could be true if the Bible were indeed only written by men.

However, would you grant that things would be greatly different if the Bible is indeed what it claims to be, the very word of God Himself? It literally calls itself “God-breathed.” If God is really there, and He has really spoken, that changes things signficantly.

As for the pervasive philosophy that the Bible only speaks of spiritual things and we have to learn about how the actual world works through other means (the famous “non-overlapping magisteria” argument), again, if the Bible is indeed God-breathed, then when it speaks, it’s speaking the truth no matter what it’s talking about. The Bible has a lot to say about a lot of things in the world. How should one decide which things to believe and disbelieve? If a person already puts himself in that position, there’s no logical reason not to simply go the whole way (the route you yourself have taken) and simply disbelieving all of it.

That’s why I call them incompatible. Once you decide you get to pick and choose what’s accurate and what isn’t, you’ve already said it isn’t God-breathed, and at that point, you may as well not believe any of it.

As for my motives in defending Christians who support evolution – all I can say is that I like to be truthful and accurate. Science and evolution did not cause me to become an atheist and while I see some forms of religous belief as being incompatible with science I do not see all forms as being incompatible. I do not consider science as having disproved God. Science neither proves nor disproves God – it is concerned with explaining the universe.

I do not like sloppy thinking – having engaged in enough of it in my time, and likely to do so again in the future being merely human – and sloppy arguments. The argument that science and evolution are incompatible with Christianity is one such example to my thinking. One used by both the atheist and the Christian to the detriment of what is true.

If you could prove that God did indeed write the Bible then you might have a case. However let me state that it was in reading the Bible that I first started asking the questions that led me to become an atheist (a process that I am detailing on my blog Bad Atheist). And those questions would be even more pointed and disturbing were it proved that God did directly write every word of the Bible and that every word was literal truth.

However there are too many issues and problems with this claim.

And let me point this out to you, when explaining something to a four year old child, say how a car works, do you go into the details of each part of the engine and how the gas and air combine or give a simpler explanation and wait for the more complex one when they are older and better able to understand?

In this case I believe that what was important – again from a liberal Christian point of view – is the chronicle of man’s relationship with God.
As for how we tell the difference between what is right and what is wrong – the same as we do anything.

Test it.

If it cannot stand the testing then it is wrong.

Test it against other ways of thinking. Test it against the world. Test it against yourself and your life experiences.

Do you still believe that slavery is right? After all the Bible never condemns it and instead seems content to merely regulate it. That is an idea that has failed. Yet it is Biblical.

Do you still believe in polygamy? That is another idea that has failed. Yet it is Biblical.

You have already rejected many of the ideas of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. Yet some of the ideas in the Old Testament you still keep. You are already picking and choosing. Which is why even those Christians who agree that the Bible is the literal word of God still disagree.

In this case the description of how the world came into being while correct from a metaphorical point of view (speaking as a liberal Christian) is incorrect from a scientific view.

However some of the things the Bible says are true. And I, as an atheist, will freely acknowledge this – so it is a mistake to say that I reject all of the Bible.

What I really hate about these small windows is not being able to see my whole response to get a feel for how well it flows and holds together.

Anyway, this is getting long again, it is getting late again, and I am past my bed time. Again.

Sorry for the small windows. I, too, am frustrated by the format of the comments on this template. Will have to try to come up with another blog template someday.

Sorry also for my long delay in replying.

Four things to briefly comment on:

1. Not everything reported in the Bible (e.g. polygamy, rape, etc.) is approved by the Bible.

2. The slavery in the culture of the Bible was monumentally different from what we Americans think of when we talk about slavery from the time of the founding of the USA. And Paul indeed charged Philemon to have an extremely different relationship with Onesimus, even though he was still his slave. Just because some American slave owners used Bible passages to try to justify their treatment of slaves, it was actually evolutionary thought that encouraged people to believe that dark-skinned people were less than human. So cruel slave owners who quoted the Bible were actually acting inconsistenly with their stated belief system, while they were in fact acting consistently with the racist tenets that are a logical outworking of evolutionary thought.

3. To understand the pattern of living as a New Testament believer rather than a Hebrew during Old Testament times, you have to approach all of the Bible as a cohesive whole (which it is). To cherry pick parts here and there without understanding the whole story of redemptive history is going to leave you destined to misunderstand many parts.

4. History cannot be tested scientifically. Only the present can. Even making predictions does not mean that one is doing science on the past, as there can be (and are) other competing explanations that are equally or more predictive and explanatory. It all depends on your underlying assumptions (presuppositions) which cannot be proven no matter which stance one takes.

1) Not everything reported in the Bible was condoned by God. I agree. However he did condone the killing of women and children in Joshua (Joshua 11: 18 -21 as one example among many).

He did condone the killing of those who do not believe in families that did believe.

Deut 13:6 – 11 – 6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your fathers have known, 7 gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), 8 do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. 9 You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people. 10 Stone him to death, because he tried to turn you away from the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 11 Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again.

There are other problematic passages such as the killing of witches and homosexuals.

2. Slavery. I agree that slavery in ancient Isreal was vastly different from that practiced by American slaveowners. I would even agree that it was better than that of other civilizations of their times.

However does that make it right? Would you be for instituting such a practice today?

In regards to evolutionary thought that encouraged people to think blacks less than human – that was happening before Darwin. In fact Darwin’s ideas were opposed by those who supported slavery. From Darwin:

Page 442: “The rise from savagery to Shakespearean nobility was a comforting crumb to the Victorian gentry. But it was a short step to
the racist slurs that Darwin was already hearing.

Given the dinner table wisdoom that genteel Anglo Saxons towered above their blackbutlers, evolution cast a shadow over ancestral purity. Lyell himself was irrestistibly drawn to the thereom: go back umpteen generations and would blacks and whites find a common ancestor?
Itself the descendant of an ape” The very idea ‘would give a shock to… nearly all men.’ No university would sanction it; even teaching it ‘would ensure the expulsion of a Prof. already
installed.’ Races was blowing up as an emotive issue in the 1850’s.

The hardbitten Robert Knox (he of the Burke and Hare scandal) achieved a new notoriety by his doom mongering about coming racial wars. He made the races separate species. Others like Louis Agassiz made them separate Creations; and one of Darwin’s contacts thought it ‘fortunate for those of us who respect our ancestors & repudiate even the contamination of Negro blood – that Agassiz remains, to do battle with the transmutationists.’

The Society itself was an abomination, and the American Civil War only heightened Darwin’s detestation. Despite Gray’s dispatches on
the ‘dreadful carnage’ during the Battle of the Wildereness, he remained adamant ‘that the destruction of Slavery would be well worth
a dozen years war.’ There was no scientific justification for slavery, and the entire rival Ethnological Society agreed.

London partisans were now busy shoring up positions on the race question with the inalienable truths of biology. The white supremacist
Anthropologicals were at the throats of the abolitionist Etnologicals (led by Huxley, Busk, Lubbock, Galton, and Wallace,with Darwin an
honorary fellow and Eras on the Council).”

It is noteworthy here that it is those supporting evolution who were aguing against slavery here whereas the creationist were arguing against it.

The lines fourwinds are not so easily drawn.

The idea that some people are superior than others has been around long before evolution. I have already made a long post longer with several quotes so I will just say that should you read works in the 16th and 17th century – well before evolution – you will find writings expressing the idea that the black race were inferior. For that matter just lLook at the whole idea of royalty and the emphasis on breeding.

Evolution was misused to provide further justification for such ideas just as Christianity was. Slavery and the idea of racial superiority is no more the logical consequence of evolution than it is of Christianity.

3) The key point here is that you do not believe that the Bible is to be wholly followed today. Not in slavery, not in killing witches and not in several other items. You are already testing those items in the Old Testament and modifying them against what you believe the New Testament says. Two comments here:

A) Deciding what to keep and what is no longer relevant according to the New Testament follower varies greatly dependent on how individuals and churches interpret “the whole story of redemptive history”.

B) For those Christians who support evolution they would add a third criteria – the natural world and science. Just as the Bible is a creation of God through man so to is nature the creation of God through the workings of his natural laws.

I once posted on another forum on how this works, so let me just repost that here:

Now both the creation story and the story of the flood as well as the tower of Babylon all violate known physical laws and also have massive amounts of evidence against them. Given that the Christian – who values his God given ability to reason – will then understand that this part of the Bible is a metaphor or allegory meant to illustrate some aspect of humankind’s relationship with God and not meant to be taken literally (even if earlier people who were not as knowledgeable as we are now may have taken it as so). And that Christian will then try to understand what is meant by those passages in terms of his relationship with God.

Now, when you get to the resurrection and the miracles of Jesus – yes, those violate known laws of nature. However, if you believe in God, we have no evidence that he couldn’t and did not violate the laws of nature he created. If God does exist then this would be possible for him.

Note that this is different from the creation story, the flood story, and the tower story where we have actual physical evidence that these events not only conflicted with known physical laws but also did not happen. While Jesus and his miracles violate the laws of nature, we have no physical evidence that they did not happen.

This is where, for the intelligent Christian, faith comes in. Due to his own personal experience of God he believes in God’s existence. Therefore he believes in Jesus and his resurrection. That person will not try to claim objective proof for it but will take it as an article of faith that it did in actuality happen. If this person is a scientist he will admit it cannot be proved and will not try to do so. But while he only looks for natural laws in his work as a scientist he will believe in the miracles and resurrection of Jesus as a person and as an article of faith, not science.

4) Actually much of history can be tested and validated. Not in the same way as physics but still checked for accuracy.

In regards to the presuppositions argument, I believe it to be often flawed. If you are talking about science then the wrong pre-suppositions will show themselves wrong by the evidence.

To show this would involve discussing specific issues and not broad generalities. And given that I think I have just won the long windedness contest I think I will let that one lie for the moment.

Let me just end this with apologies in advance for any typos and strange wordings. Given the length, the difficulty (for me) of adequately proofreading such a long post in this small scroll down box, and the lateness of the hour I have not proof read this as closely as I normally would.

Just noticed I failed to give the complete reference in regards to my quotes about Darwin. The book was Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Desmond and Moore. This is probably the best single volume biography of Charles Darwin. The best multi volume biography would be Janet Brown’s two volume biography – just in case you’re interested.

the seven day week comes from the proximate time for the four phases of the moon. three weeks of seven days, and then a week with eight or nine days, or else four seven ay weeks and an extra special day or two, this has been found in bot western and non western cultures So, there IS a natural explanation for it, as there is a natural explanation for months, years, days, etc.

Art, your explanation doesn’t even make sense. What society use any longer week of 8 or nine days every moon cycle? Where are the extra special days stuck in? That simply doesn’t happen. Even now that we have a “leap year,” the extra day in the year still folds into a 7-day week.